Mysterious Universe

Pretty much everyone, I’m sure, who is acquainted with conspiracy theories will also be aware of at least some of the controversies pertaining to accounts of so-called alien abduction. And, for the most part at least, it all began on the night of September 19, 1961. On that night, Betty and Barney Hill, a married couple from New Hampshire, were driving home from Canada when they were subjected to a terrifying experience. Until their arrival home, there was little to indicate that anything untoward had happened during the course of the journey, however.

After some months of unexplained emotional distress, the couple could take no more, and they sought assistance from Benjamin Simon, a Boston-based psychiatrist and neurologist. Subjected to rigorous time-regression hypnosis, both Betty and Barney recalled what had taken place during that missing two hours. Astonishingly, they provided very close account of encounters with seemingly alien beings who had taken the pair on-board some form of craft, and who had subjected them to a variety of distressing physical examinations.

Since that day, hundreds – perhaps even thousands – of similar accounts have surfaced throughout the world. A turning point came in 1981 with the publication of the late Budd Hopkins’ book Missing Time. Detailing a number of such accounts, Hopkins put forward a theory suggesting that at least one extraterrestrial species was involved in the routine abduction of human beings. Hopkins’ later work revealed a potentially far more sinister link to the abductions: namely, that the aliens were kidnapping people as part of some genetic operation, the goal of which was the production of a half-alien, half-human hybrid race.

There is, however, another aspect to the alien abduction mystery – one that is, in some ways, even more controversial than the extraterrestrial hypothesis. There are those researchers and eye-witnesses (or perhaps “victims” would be a much better term) who believe that alien abductions have nothing to do with the activities of real-life extraterrestrials, but are, in reality, the result of clandestine work undertaken by the U.S. military.

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Psychedelic guidebooks, magnetic morality, and healing with sound feature on this weekend’s Plus+ exclusive. 

We take a look at cases of poisonous Jelly Rain and its connections to biological warfare.

Read on for show notes, books, and very confusing videos.

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Flying solo this week, Aaron recounts tales of Haunted Catalina Island, looks at Centaur sightings in North America and discovers a bizarre way to get high.

We find out what the guidelines are for hunting Yeti in Nepal and much more.

Links and music after the jump.

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In recent weeks, parts of rural Sri Lanka have been subjected to a terrifying and peculiar phenomenon which, according to reports, has begun to turn deadly.

Reports of so-called “Grease Devils,” once believed only to be a part of the folklore of the South Asian Islands, have incited panic in towns like Puttalam in the country’s North Western Province over the last few days. During a particularly violent outbreak that occurred Sunday, one police constable was reportedly killed after angry townsfolk attacked him. At present, the reasons for the attack remain unclear.

Traditionally, reports of “Grease Devils” involve phantom attackers who either wear little or no clothing at all, covering their bodies in grease or oily substances that make their bodies difficult to grasp by would-be-captors. It is typical for these phantom-attackers to assail young women with unwanted sexual advances, sometimes breaking into homes under the cover of night.

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In the classic Back to the Future film series, the slightly off-kilter (but lovable) Doc Brown manages to retrofit a DeLorean with a temporal-displacement device known famously as a “flux capacitor,” resulting in a car that, after accelerating to speeds exceeding 88 miles-per-hour, is able to travel to different predetermined points in time. At present, the notion of literal time travel–while remaining a subject that is hotly contested by physicists–is also something that has remained relegated to the realm of films and science fiction.

But according to the peculiar exploits of one Russian scientist, the creation of devices that might be literally capable of displacing time around an individual might finally be a reality. In fact, if the claims of Vadim Alexandrovich Chernobrov are anything more than rumor or hearsay, then we are being asked to believe that Chernobrov himself may have succeeded in the creation of a functional time machine.

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There can be very few people who have not at least heard of the exploits of the notorious Mothman of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, a bizarre, flying creature that was made famous in the 2002 movie The Mothman Prophecies that starred Richard Gere and that, in turn, was based on the book of the same name penned by the late authority on just about everything paranormal and supernatural, John Keel. But, long before Mothman dared to surface from his strange and ominous lair in the mid 1960s, there was yet another mysterious winged thing that struck terror into the hearts and minds of those who were unfortunate enough to cross its terrible path.

Certainly one of the most bizarre of all the many and varied strange beings that haunts the lore and legend of Texas is that which became known, albeit very briefly, as the Houston Batman. The most famous encounter with the beast took place during the early morning hours of June 18, 1953. Given the fact that it was a hot and restless night, twenty three year old housewife Hilda Walker, and her neighbors, fourteen year old Judy Meyer and thirty three year old tool plant inspector Howard Phillips, were sitting on the porch of Walker’s home, located at 118 East Third Street in the city of Houston.

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In the centuries before phrases like “flying saucers” and “Unidentified Flying Objects” became common vernacular, thousands of people claimed to have witnessed bizarre lights and strange boat-like vehicles traversing the heavens. Skeptics dismiss these reports as misidentified natural phenomenon like comets and meteors, but ancient alien theorists are equally convinced that these odd objects prove that our world has been receiving extraterrestrial visitors for generations.

While it would seems as if there’s at least a kernel of truth in both camps; what we’re focusing on here is a fascinating, and oft neglected, footnote to the sky ship mystery. A series of bizarre events that took place over the course of more than a millennia — from the dark ages to the wild west — involving UFOs dropping anchor over the Earth… literally.

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